Category Archives: railroad

Drove up to Pinal this morning to swap out some equipment. Getting to/from Pinal from the highway isn’t difficult, just 18 miles, with 12 of them on a really great-condition (at least until the rains come) dirt road.

Once I was finished with my other hobby, I started down the road and parked at the Signal Peak turnoff (651B). As I’d never been to Signal, and I’d never used the mobile PeakBagger app to record a hike, I was able to do both and learn a thing or two or three new things.

The first thing I learned was that Signal was less than 300′ minimum prominence, and that’s what I’d set my PeakBagger filter for, so Signal didn’t show up until I dialed that down to 250′.

Last week I had the pleasure to spend in far-south Chicagoland, where it started out 48 °F and raining and ended up 18 °F with black ice everywhere. Not immediately, but once the ice formed, it stayed in place the rest of my visit. Made for some dicey walking.

However, my buddies at the RR, like the post office, work rain or shine, ice or sleet, snow or sand, and were busy installing my hoped-for array of antennas on a homebrew rack up on the roof.

Little hard to see in the photos, but it’s basically a triangular array of 3 tripod mounts held down with a bunch of concrete blocks, then two-sided unistrut forming two vertically spaced equal equilateral triangles, upon which it’s easy to set vertical pipes to attach antennas.

Right now the lab I’m helping to build (in the building below) needs far better cellular connections for the industrial modems that we’re testing, so the antennas on the roof will solve a lot of our mysterious connectivity problems.

The lab also needs a solid GPS antenna on the roof – I have a rack-mounted 8-way GPS splitter inside and I’ll feed one antenna to multiple devices in the lab that need GPS.

The runs from the antennas on the roof to the rack are all 1/2″ superflex, and we’ve got grounded lightning protectors at the rack and shield grounds just before the coaxes penetrate the building. We’re also way lower than many better lightning targets all around us, so we’re probably as safe as we can be.

Next step is to head back there and start assembling some LMR240 jumper cables to run from the rack connections to the final resting places for the signals received.